Make Your Bar Manager a Hero

Give them the power to create strong sales promotions that make more sales

Over 72 million litres of alcohol is consumed globally every single day, according to official figures. This adds up to more than 329 billion pints of beer, 31 billion bottles of wine, and 27 billion litres of spirit each year; a massive market.

A high proportion of these sales are generated by the pub and bar industry, but the pressure is always on bar managers to find new ways to increase sales. As a premium alcohol brand, your role is to help them achieve this – but how can you do it in a way that doesn’t increase their workload?

Helping bar managers to seize the opportunity

In the UK alone, the pub and bar industry contributes £23.1 billion to the economy, Oxford Economics data reveals. However, you only have to look at the number of venues in any town centre to see how competitive the market is. Bar managers are constantly being pressurised to out-perform the competition, and part of your job is to develop new brand sales opportunities that gets them that much-needed boost.

This may seem like an enormous task, however increasing on-trade sales can actually be quite straightforward – if you have the right strategy for persuading consumers to try something new. And that strategy needs to revolve around a strong point of sale campaign.

The good news for brands is that pub and bar patrons have an appetite for the unfamiliar. According to Maxus, 51% of under-35s enjoy trying new alcoholic drinks, while Google’s consumer barometer has found that nearly half over-55s will consider more than one brand when purchasing food or drink. Clearly, drinkers at both ends of the spectrum are open-minded when it comes to stepping outside their comfort zone.

As we’ve already mentioned, one of the most effective ways to influence consumer purchasing is point of sale material, but all too often it falls to an already overstretched bar manager to develop these assets.

It doesn’t have to be like this, however. Menu design technology is available to drinks brands, which takes the responsibility off the venue’s shoulders and gives you both the opportunity to create attractive on-trade menus and other collateral in a quick and straightforward way.

This doesn’t have to take away creative control from venue staff, either. Good POS design software will enable your brand team to create core templates for campaigns, which sales reps can then develop into customised collateral with input from bar managers. By enabling them to personalise elements such as text, imagery, branding and prices they can create something that works for their aesthetic, but which also adheres to your brand guidelines and overarching marketing strategy.

As importantly, working collaboratively like this can really leverage consumer insight. Nobody knows the end consumer like the bar manager who interacts with them on a daily basis. By sitting down with your field sales staff and designing a bespoke menu from a range of approved templates, they can create something that they know will resonate with your target market and help you to sell more of your brand in their bar.

Making staff lives easier as well

It’s not just the design of the menu that bar managers can tailor, either. When developing the campaign, your central team can create a set of serving suggestions for your beverages, so your customers can choose the serves they want to offer at their establishment.

You can then use your POS software designer to enable a smooth roll-out of these new mixes, by producing templated educational material for staff. These cue cards can explain the brand story behind each drink suggestion and provide recipes to help them prepare each beverage to a consistent standard, creating the perfect serve.

You can then automatically generate a suite of supporting materials to help each venue promote these new drinks concepts across their digital marketing channels and on-trade, including web banners, social media adverts and flyers – all with consistent branding.

61% of consumers have not decided what brand to order when they purchase alcohol.
Creo

Working smarter with sales staff

Sometimes brand sales reps are in danger of annoying bar managers as they take up valuable time when they are busy. Creating templated POS collateral means your team is coming to them with useful easy-to-activate ideas, which help them meet their targets as well as your own; bar managers will be far happier to set aside time to engage with your sales reps enabling them to build a stronger relationship.

This change of tact means your field sales team can use their time with bar managers productively, to create on-trade menus and other marketing collateral that helps them to sell more. You can even go the final mile in making your brand POS marketing easy for bar managers and send any collateral you create together straight to the printers during a site visit, so they emerge from your meeting a hero amongst their peers.

Creating a reciprocal relationship not only takes the pressure off managerial staff, it creates a win/win scenario for brands and bars alike: you get to control the creative process and develop collateral that applies your brand guidelines; they get a suite of marketing collateral featuring their branding, with minimum hassle.

Any POS marketing produced is consistent with the rest of your outreach – and, despite being customised, is branded uniformly across your vendor network, for a cohesive consumer experience. Plus, with more materials at their fingertips, your bar managers have a quick and easy route to launching new promotions that will increase drinks sales for both of you, so they’re much more likely to adopt your campaigns.

To capture the attention of consumers, your brand needs to look beyond the standard menu format.

Menu Maker by Brandgility is the ideal software for designing customisable collateral, which your bar manager network can easily adapt to become a sales promotion hero.